Firms to Give Yearly Awards for Excellence : Promotion: Sterling Council will cite as many as a dozen local businesses each year to recognize efforts to raise the quality of products and services.

To recognize corporate efforts to raise the quality of products and services, a group of companies with offices in Orange County on Wednesday announced an award program that will cite as many as a dozen local businesses each year.

The awards are patterned after the prestigious Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Awards, half a dozen of which are given out each year to quality-conscious concerns nationwide by the federal Commerce Department.

The Sterling Council said it will give its Sterling Awards in Orange County to large and small manufacturers, large and small service companies, and public entities such as cities and nonprofit organizations. The awards will be presented for the first time next spring at the council’s annual conference on quality.

Written applications will be available in the fall; concerns that are semi-finalists will also be personally inspected by the judges.

The council also released a survey Wednesday that shows that a majority of companies with operations in Orange County are concerned about excellence. The Graduate School of Management at UC Irvine sent out 3,000 questionnaires to local companies and got back about 300 responses, which the school says is a large enough group to be statistically significant.

The survey found that, of the companies responding--most of them large concerns and many of them manufacturers--80% already have quality improvement programs. Of those programs, nearly half have been in effect for between one and three years, the survey found.

Of companies without quality improvement programs, more than half said they plan to start such projects within a year or two.

Ninety business people attended Wednesday’s breakfast meeting, the Sterling Council’s first public session.

The council, which has 18 members, was founded in 1991 to promote quality improvement among local concerns. The founders are the local office of accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwick, the Graduate School of Management at UCI and the Orange County Edition of the Los Angeles Times.